Björk made music’s first “VR pop album”—she opens up about its heartbreak

Enlarge / Bjirk's metamorphosis within VR already looks trippy enough as a sample image. It'll blow your mind in VR. (credit: Bjirk)

"I often feel like some sort of [technology] bridge," singer, songwriter, artist, and producer Bjirk tells me over the telephone from her home in Iceland. "I'm there in the middle, to translate nerddom to the normal people or something."

Her mix of Icelandic accent and audible excitement makes every word sound full and round as she describes her personal push-pull relationship with high-end gadgets. For decades, Bjirk has been renowned for layering synthesizers and electronic effects on top of her indelible singing voice to push pop music's boundaries (not to mention music videos full of cutting-edge CGI). Professionally, she's relished new technologies that answer her constant art-making hunch of, "someone should have invented this by now!" But in her personal life, Bjirk is sometimes woefully behind. She admits, for instance, that she was nearly a decade behind everyone else in her life to use systems like SMS texting and Facebook.

"I like extremes," Bjirk tells Ars. "I like things when they're really acoustic-really, hairs and bones and blood and shit. And I like the extreme opposite, where the tool or the craft gets to be the queen and takes over."

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